Re: controversial paper
From: Tom St Denis (tomstdenis_at_iahu.ca)
Date: 09/27/03
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Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2003 00:26:28 GMT
"kurt wismer" <kurtw@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:ip4db.13957$yD1.1571998@news20.bellglobal.com...
> Tom St Denis wrote:
> [snip]
> > The net sum of the paper is "windows bad because it has flaws". Well
you
>
> y'know, that's not how i read it... i read it as "windows is bad
> because it's too widespread"...
>
> the big issue seemed to be the "monoculture", where everyone has
> exactly the same set of vulnerabilities installed as everyone else,
> thereby making the potential collapse of our technological
> infrastructure much more feasible...
Perhaps. I stopped reading it a few pages in because of how ludicrous it
is. Essentially smells of /.
> [snip]
> > If anything switching OSes will only make the problem worse. GNU/Linux
is
> > much harder for a newbie to setup correctly and more likely to fall to
> > attack [just ask anyone off the street what say "/etc/init.d/sshd stop"
> > means...]
>
> i think you're missing the larger picture - vulnerabilities will always
> be with us, individual platforms will always face these problems and
> the people who use those platforms will always make mistakes... it's
> far better, however, if the infrastructure as a whole has redundancies
> that are diverse in their technological nature so that a single
> vulnerability can't bring down everything...
At what cost though? I mean by this logic an office of immigration workers
should have to deal with what, 8 different OSes on 16 different types of
computers just in case one gets a virus? Also if the paper was just about
the deployment of Windows and not it's quality why would the dude have been
fired?
The thing is [what the paper misses] is not all window installations are the
same. I installed my windows behind a firewall and did all of the updates
before installing anything else. Many others I know don't even get as far
as SP1 before browsing the web...So just because some poorly setup
government shop gets rooted doesn't mean that's windows vast deployments
fault.
Though I agree that diversity is good I don't think the solution is jumping
on windows. Quite a few problems can be fixed just by properly setting up
computers before deploying them.
Tom
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